How Heston was blinded by science...

He famously uses science to turn gastronomy into an art. But TV chef Heston Blumenthal, who likes to use liquid nitrogen in his culinary creations, has revealed how he was nearly blinded with household bleach.

A playful fight between the Michelin-starred restaurateur and his friend, the ITV sports commentator Lee Dixon, got out of hand and, says Blumenthal, he lost the sight in his right eye. It has taken him years to recover from the accident.

It happened on a lads’ ski trip to Switzerland when, for some long-forgotten reason, Lee and Heston decided to fight each other armed with lavatory brushes and loo rolls.

Playfight gone wrong: Heston Blumenthal has revealed how he was
nearly blinded with household bleach during a playful fight with friend Lee Dixon

‘We were behaving outrageously,’ Heston, 46, tells me. ‘Don’t ask me why — or if drink was involved — but I stuffed a lavatory roll in Lee’s mouth, saying he was talking rubbish.

‘He retaliated by hitting me on the head with the handle of a bog brush. Unfortunately, although he didn’t hit me hard, my glasses pinged off and the actual brushes went into my eye.

‘That was bad enough but they were soaked in bleach and it burned off six layers of my eye. It was agony.’

The self-taught chef and owner of the acclaimed Fat Duck at Bray, Berks, was talking about the injury at a party to launch a new range of spectacles which Blumenthal has just designed for Vision Express.

He himself is long-sighted and his outre spectacles have become something of a trademark. But because of his injury, he cannot wear contact lenses.

‘It was agony,’ he says. ‘In Switzerland they washed out my eye, but I had to have more treatment back in the UK.’

So has he forgiven his pal? ‘I was mad with him at first, but it was an accident, after all, and luckily my sight was saved,’ says Heston who is divorcing his wife of 20 years, Zanna.

‘She is a good woman,’ he adds. ‘She is not going after me, trying to wipe me out financially. We are now amicable and send each other friendly emails.’

Meanwhile, the father-of-three says he is happily in love with his new partner Suzanne Pirret, 45, a glamorous cookery writer.

David Miliband’s timing of the announcement that he is quitting as MP for South Shields is intriguing.

Under Parliamentary convention, he remains an MP until his departure has been announced to the Commons — and that cannot happen for more than two weeks because the House is now in recess for Easter.

Which would mean the former Foreign Secretary could continue to receive his Westminster salary.

However, money-loving Mili will remain on the board of Sunderland FC where in January it emerged that he had earned £125,000 for just 15 days’ work. Trebles all round!

Stretch in pay: Under Parliamentary convention, David Miliband remains an MP until his departure has been announced to the Commons, which can't happen for two weeks due to the Easter recess, meaning he could continue to receive his Westminster salary

Emma on the course of love

Channel 4 horse racing presenter Emma Spencer

Her winning smile may set viewers pulses racing, but three years after the breakdown of her marriage, glamourpuss Emma Spencer is yet to find new love.

‘In my job you meet loads of people, so from that point of view I’m lucky.

But I don’t get asked out by other jockeys because I know most of them, and I was married to one!’ says Emma, 33, who was wed to top rider Jamie Spencer for four years.

‘I think it’s pretty unlikely I’ll go out with anyone in racing again. It’s a small world,’ she says. ‘I did go out with a guy for about a year‑and-a-half, but he wasn’t a jockey.’

As for running into Jamie on the racecourse, Emma, who is part of the Channel 4 team covering next month’s Grand National, says: ‘You would think that given what has happened it would be awkward, but I am fine when I have to interview him after a race. We are both professionals and, after all, we do have three young children together.’

But perhaps Emma can use her culinary skills to bag a date — she has just taken part in a special episode of TV’s Come Dine With Me.

Prince Harry’s six-day trip to the U.S. in May is already generating excitement — mixed with some resentment. For locals in leafy Greenwich, Connecticut, where Harry will play a charity polo match, complain that the event is by invitation only.

Fans hoping to rub shoulders with Harry will need to have the right connections to get into snooty Greenwich Polo Club, a gated community where Hollywood director Ron Howard lives.

Harry will, no doubt, try to avoid falling off his horse, as he did when competing in New York in 2010. And he will also hope to avoid the embarrassing experience that befell the Duchess of York when she visited the club in 1987.

As a giant boa constrictor was produced during a charity fund-raiser, Fergie, who has a phobia of snakes, promptly threw up, thinking it was about to be draped around her shoulders.

Olivia has food on the brain

Making people fell better: Olivia Inge

Like many a top model who has passed the 30 mark, leggy Olivia Inge has an eye on the future.

The flame-haired beauty has already one extra string to her bow, as a qualified masseuse, but now she tells me excitedly she’s heading back to school.

In fact, Olivia, a descendant of 19th-century Prime Minister William Gladstone, has accepted a place at Reading University where she will start a BSc degree course in the autumn.

Speaking at a Tanqueray Gin pop-up party in Covent Garden, Olivia, 32, says the superficial world of fashion made her think seriously about doing a university degree.

‘I wasn’t that good at school, except for French, then I fell into modelling,’ says Wells Cathedral School-educated Olivia who first modelled for Vivienne Westwood at 16.

‘Plus, I didn’t know what I wanted to do for a job. It’s taken me this long to discover what I’m good at.‘I’ll be doing a food science degree, which I’m thrilled about. I won’t leave London, though, but will commute to Reading.

‘It’s not that I don’t like modelling — it can be fun — but I want to find a job in which I can make people feel better. I’ve already got my little massage business going, but this new step is very serious.’

As the inquest into the death of fallen tycoon Boris Berezovsky opens today, a new figure has emerged, the exiled Russian’s mistress, Annika Ancverina, 23.

The former Moscow student, who had been the oligarch’s lover off and on for six years, has approached former Berezovsky advisor Richard Hillgrove, insisting the oligarch would not have taken his own life.

‘She was with him two days before his death and spoke to him the night before he died. Although she wasn’t in the house, she is sure he would not commit suicide,’ says Hillgrove, who advised Berezovsky to appear on BBC’s Question Time in 2007.

‘She is also very doubtful that he wrote letters to the Russians begging to come home.’

Annika, whose presence in Berezovsky’s life I revealed in 2009, played a key part in his battle with Roman Abramovich — serving the High Court papers on the Chelsea FC owner.

She has taken the title Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho. Says Howard, whose book on his porn king father Paul Raymond, The King Of Soho, is being made into a film: ‘Good to see Martha Lane Fox has decided to call herself after my locale.